Kiev needs Russian aggression myth to worm out Western loans

MOSCOW, April 22. /TASS/. The main reason why the Ukrainian parliament (Verkhovna Rada) is so fond of indulging in "war-with-Russia" rhetoric is it hopes in this way to offer at least some excuses to its own people for heavy military losses and at the same time to demand Western money and weapons supplies that would enable it to go ahead with the military crackdown on the southeast of the country, polled experts have told TASS.

On Tuesday, the Ukrainian legislators voted for a resolution entitled On Rebuffing Armed Russian Aggression and Overcoming its Effects.

In part, the resolution says that "if Russia refuses to end armed aggression against Ukraine, the Verkhovna Rada urges the international community to tighten sanctions against Russia as an ‘aggressor state’ and accelerate wider financial assistance and weapons supplies to Ukraine in view of the fact the country has to resist Russian armed aggression."

"The Ukrainian authorities no longer have an idea what else can be thrown into the fire of anti-Russian sentiment inside the country and abroad," the deputy chairman of the Federation Council’s international affairs committee, Andrei Klimov, has told TASS. "Kiev keeps talking about its struggle against an alleged aggressor state, Russia, for the sole purpose of worming another portion of loans from the Western countries, because Western investors have begun to turn their backs on Ukraine. For Russia the Ukrainian parliament’s resolution is legally void. This document should rather be taken to psychoanalysts for examination," Klimov said.

"The key word in the Ukrainian parliament’s resolution is "rebuff." Rebuff to an ostensible Russian aggression, although nobody has been able to present to Moscow any proof of a Russian military presence in Ukraine. Kiev’s belligerent rhetoric masks the reluctance to recognize that the Ukrainian army has failed in its military crackdown on the southeast. Now the authorities in Kiev are trying to find an external enemy - Russia - to distract attention from the army’s low combat readiness," says military expert Konstantin Sivkov, the president of the Geopolitical Problems Academy.

"The authorities in Kiev should address civilian issues - finance and the economy, but the treasury is empty and debts are many. In its calls for urgent financial aid addressed to the international community the Verkhovna Rada blames Russia again and again as the root cause of all Ukrainian misfortunes, although Moscow has nothing to do with them," Sivkov told TASS.

"Very soon, when part of the Ukrainian army will have to be demobilized, the commander-in-chief, Petro Poroshenko, will be unable to explain the people why so many military have not returned home. For the president it would be more convenient to blame the heavy loss of life on a ‘Russian aggression’, and not an abortive "anti-terrorist operation in Donbass," Sivkov said.

"The Verkhovna Rada adopted the resolution about a ‘Russian aggression’ in order to provide ideological basis for vague and unconvincing explanations of Ukraine’s grave position, including the situation in the zone of so-called ‘anti-terrorist’ operation’," a lecturer at the political theories chair of the Moscow state institute of international relations MGIMO (university), Kirill Koktysh, told TASS. "The Ukrainian legislators’ wish to create some legal pretext for addressing Russia with a consolidated complaint is groundless, because Kiev provides no proof of what might look as Russian aggression. The Verkhovna Rada’s resolution is not a legal document but sheer propaganda, meant for domestic use," Koktysh said.

And the director of the Institute of Political Studies, Sergey Markov, interprets the Ukrainian parliament’s resolution as evidence Kiev is getting ready for another offensive against the self-proclaimed Donetsk and Luhansk people’s republics. "Kiev has followed in the US and NATO allies’ footsteps to accuse Moscow Russian military are involved in hostilities in Donbass, says Markov, a member of Russia’s Civic Chamber. But the leadership of the Donetsk People’s Republic says 70 mercenaries from the US private military company Academi were moved to the area of the village of Volnovakha on Tuesday. And a group of 300 US military instructors have arrived in Lvov. President Poroshenko has declared that military specialists from Britain, Canada, Poland and other countries have joined the US instructors. This unmistakably points at who really foments aggression in Ukraine. It’s surely not Russia," Markov told TASS.